With the acquisition of Lexcycle, the producer of the iPhone ebook app Stanza, Amazon is consolidating its lead in ebooks. They are also signaling that it’s less about the device you use to read ebooks and more about distribution. Distribution is where the real profits lie. People buy a Kindle once, but they may purchase thousands of dollars worth of ebooks and e-periodicalsover their lifespan as a consumer. This is where Amazon wants to be. Not in making hardware, but in selling digital goods and controlling a large portion of the marketplace. The only reason Amazon really needed the Kindle was to create the marketplace. Once people are accustomed to buying their ebooks from Amazon, the device becomes irrelevant.

So, it is natural that Amazon wants to insert itself wherever people are actually reading. Although Amazon may want people to read on a Kindle, if they’re reading on their iPhones they will want to be in front of them there, too.

Amazon is also very aware of how successfully Apple cornered the market on digital music early on with iTunes. It was not until the record labels relented and agreed to sell music in open formats such as MP3 that other competitors such as Amazon were able to emerge to compete with iTunes. If Amazon can dominate ebooks as they have ecommerce in general, they will be in a similar position.

As an aside:

With the success of Amazon’s MP3 store, both iTunes and Amazon have raised their prices, which probably pleases the record industry. In this sense, competition can be bad for consumers and for merchants but better for content creators as they can play merchants off against one another.

While Amazon would prefer to sell digital music rather than not, they would most prefer to be the biggest seller of digital music. By extending their lead in ebooks, they are building their leverage with publishers and a wall against competition. Ultimately, this may be a good thing for consumers as Amazon will seek to sell as much as they can.

He carefully recorded his dreams, fantasies, and visions, and drew, painted, and sculpted them as well. He found that his experiences tended to form themselves into persons, beginning with a wise old man and his companion, a little girl. The wise old man evolved, over a number of dreams, into a sort of spiritual guru. The little girl became “anima,” the feminine soul, who served as his main medium of communication with the deeper aspects of his unconscious. #

Good description of “anima”.

The anima and animus, in Carl Jung’s school of analytical psychology, are the unconscious or true inner self of an individual, as opposed to the persona or outer aspect of the personality. In the unconscious of the male, it finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female, it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus. #

It’s hard to remember a time when if you didn’t catch a show when it came on TV, you just totally missed it. My Dad says The Rifleman would come on once a month along with several other programs.

Watching all these shows you quickly realize that the TV western is a dead genre. Maybe like good old country music, it represents a longing for simpler times and the belief in certain values. The Rifleman is full of moral lessons: what it means to be a man, responsible for others and standing up for what’s right; the importance of hard work and honesty. Each episode Lucas McCain never misses a chance to instruct his son Mark on how to do the right thing. Watching a show like The Rifleman, you realize that popular media has the amazing ability to promote certain values through story. It just doesn’t seem to anymore. Can you think of any recent music, film, or television show which tries to promote certain values beyond the purely political? In what venue do we now consider larger moral questions?